Refugees at IWM – Where turning away is an option

Two days before visiting Forced to Flee, a friend gave me her opinion on the IWM exhibition:

I liked it. There were no crying grannies.

The idea of crying grannies accompanied me through the exhibition, and it is true – there were none to be found. Yet this concise review raised questions: why would someone expect to see weeping women at a refugee exhibition, and why would they find their absence remarkable? What genre of refugee representation does the crying grandmother fall into? What network of beliefs and expectations have built up around the idea of the refugee, such that they can be captured by the disconsolate matriarch? Tracing these representational expectations is, in itself, a branch of refugee history – and one that the IWM exhibition is working hard to reimagine.

There is nothing shocking, dramatic or distressing about Forced to Flee. It avoids representing any of the physical effects of forced displacement on the human body: anguish, injury, illness, destitution, death – or crying. The exhibition not only challenges the idea of the refugee as a silent suffering body, but interrupts the whole set of emotional relationships that go along with that idea. Forced to Flee spans a century of refugee history, but rather than taking each historical moment in turn, the exhibition follows the steps of a ‘typical’ refugee story: the departure, the journey, the arrival, the asylum procedure, the integration process. This thematic arrangement is reminiscent of Room to Breathe, an immersive exhibition of intertwined stories about new arrivals to Britain displayed at London’s Migration Museum from 2018-20. The distilled series of events (which, the exhibition implies, sufficiently summarises over a century of ‘refugee experience’) is mapped onto the ‘key’ refugee-producing conflicts of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, from Belgian refugees during the First World War, to Afghan refugees fleeing the US invasion. The exhibition’s feedback form tells us that this universalistic (some might say anachronistic) approach is designed to help visitors ‘understand how the current situation shares similar patterns with refugee stories over the past 100 years.’ 

Yet it is also a representational strategy that works to detach experience from emotion. The fragmented structure of the exhibition is a way of de-emotionalising refugee history. And it works. Informal discussions with visitors to Forced to Flee show that opinion is divided along emotional lines. That is to say, those who believe in the value of emotional connection within ‘refugee storytelling’ do not rate the exhibition very highly. One visitor described the exhibition as ‘businesslike’, complaining that it failed to generate interest in the individual stories of displaced people through too broad and disjointed a historical focus. A second visitor criticised the exhibition’s lack of ‘humanity’ – its distance and remoteness, its sanitised and detached viewpoint, its failure to ‘connect’, to ‘get the message across,’ to ‘draw the visitor in’. For some, the lack of ‘reality’ in the exhibition made the information easy to ignore, and easy to forget. 

Others have commended the exhibition’s decision not to tug at its visitors’ heartstrings, however. One attendee praised the exhibition’s ‘light touch’ – the fact that, unlike Don McCullin’s war photography, for example, ‘turning away was an option.’ For this visitor, the lack of constant pressure to empathise with and feel guilty about the suffering of refugees opened up a space for education: 

Because it wasn’t full of horror it allowed you to learn. I didn’t have much empathy, so it helped me to learn. 

There is clearly a difficult balance to be struck here. Turning away from the tendency to hyper-emotionalise ‘refugee experience’ might uncover untapped opportunities for education and communication, but how valuable can this be without an engaged audience? I asked my friend why the absence of pain, suffering and ‘crying grannies’ at the exhibition surprised her so, and her answer was telling: 

I thought I might see Alan Kurdi. That’s what I thought I was going to see.

Once again, we are reminded of just how powerful that single image has been – one picture, mapping out the landscape of refugee representation for years to come. Five years on, and it seems that the image of the little boy on the beach has become not only ‘the’ symbol of contemporary refugee arrivals in Europe, but also the default image for 100 years of European refugee history. I do not think it an exaggeration to read the ‘businesslike’ tone of the IWM exhibition as one contribution to what will doubtless be a long, concerted effort to challenge the legacy of a script that was written, through a single image, on 2 September 2015.

The image accompanying this page, taken by the editors, shows a room at the Forced to Flee exhibition.

This is one of four contributions to our round table on the Forced to Flee exhibition. The introduction, including links to all the contributions, can be found here.